It’s painfully apparent that digital revenue cannot yet support substantive professional journalism for smaller daily newspapers. I don’t know that it ever will, either. Fortunately, it does not necessarily follow that community newspapers are doomed. If the goal is to find a near-term replacement for all the revenue necessary to support a newsroom and newspaper [...]
Thanks to Steve Yelvington for unearthing a prescient piece by Philip Meyer. In AJR, back in 1995, Meyer predicted much of the disruption now shaking the news industry. Reading it today is fascinating, both for what he hit and what he missed. First, a quibble. Meyer talks about newspapers as high-turnover operations, similar to supermarkets, [...]
The Index-Tribune’s abandonment of its paywall illustrates the challenges news organizations face as they move toward paid-content models in competitive information markets. And it suggests that many, or even most, will ultimately fail.
Deconstructing Patch’s business model. The prospect? Iffy.
See main post, “Patching together a hyperlocal business model.” One of the best looks at Patch’s business model comes from Ken Doctor on Seeking Alpha. The Atlantic Wire raises some key questions about the Patch model and links out to some good resources. Business Insider’s early take, “AOL’s Patch Revenue Model Makes No Sense,” has [...]
Very few online readers demonstrate loyalty or use approaching anything like the readership of the daily print paper.
So how many people swarmed their local newspaper websites last week looking for all the Black Friday deals? Right. Unless your local newspaper offers online versions of the circulars, nobody did. That’s a problem. Online news sites are becoming increasingly irrelevant to people looking for focused shopping information, the very thing, arguably, that gave newspapers [...]
I love getting news on my iPhone, and when I get to play on a friend’s iPad it’s even better. I have no doubt that mobile platforms, from smartphones to tablets, will emerge as significant avenues for online news readership. But I’m skeptical about the short-term revenue potential in mobile for newspapers, and I’m not terribly sanguine about mobile advertising doing much to support journalism in the long-term, either.
The newspaper industry is fighting a two-front war. Some newspaper companies are fighting on three fronts. Most observers see only a single struggle for survival, and they’ve all but consigned us to the dustbin of history. That’s premature. On one hand, we’re fighting against long-term structural changes in the way people get news and advertising [...]
It’s gotten so I can sense the question coming ahead of time. Friends drop their voices into a particular register, a low, sympathetic tone, and ask, “So how are things at the paper these days, anyway?” It’s the same tone people use to ask about a relative with a terminal diagnosis. I appreciate their concern. [...]